Gender in digital games: gameplay as cyborg performance

Abstract

Computer games have now been around nearly forty years. The pace at which computer games have transformed has been so fast that at times it is exceeding thoughtful evaluation and criticism. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, academic understanding of this phenomenon has been trying to catch up with this pace. Feminist studies has also been observing computer gaming, theorizing it as another male-dominated cultural domain. Most of the feminist inquiries in this area have focused on representations of gender and violence in games. Focus on gender and identity relationships between the game players and game characters, has been relatively small. What mostly missing from the current research, is the gender transgressions and alternative subjectivities that might hold political meanings besides the personal ones. Virtual reality communities and massively multiplayer role-playing online games challenge the ideas of identity and gender. As the computer gaming world grows larger, gender representations are becoming more fluid and ambiguous; the possibilities of subversive readings of gender and alternative subjectivities expand.